It is NOT 94 degrees in Minneapolis

It's true.  It is only half of that--47 degrees--which means it's chilly.  On the other hand, when I left Kansas City yesterday afternoon, it WAS 94 degrees.  The only reason this matters is that I packed thinking it would be warm in Minneapolis and now I am here for several days and they are predicting snow this weekend and it looks like I will be cold and I am thinking I don't much care for Minnesota anymore.

Photos of the New House!!

Hey Everyone...just in case you are curious about our new house in Kansas City, I thought I would post a few photos.  These are some that I took last week when I was down there for the whole house inspection.  The results of the inspection were pretty basic--a couple things we would like them to fix or compensate us for but no deal-breakers.

Two photos from the street.  It's a nice saffron colored stucco and although you cannot see it due to the snow, there is a brand new roof (less than a year old) and some attractive, low-maintenance landscaping.

You enter through the door with heart-shaped wreath and there is a nice big foyer...

...and here are two views of the living room.  It is a rather odd shaped room and I am not sure how I will place our furniture but it is decent sized at 16x14.

This room is just off the living room and had originally been a porch but was closed in and they have been using it as an office.  We are going to try and use it as a formal dining room.  The photo is a little deceiving and the room is actually 12x10 which is about the same as our dining room before we did the remodel.

The kitchen is enormous and has both a little family room area and an eating area just off of it.  This photo is taken while standing in the family room. (The guy is the house inspector)

this is the opposite angle, looking through the kitchen with the family room in the background

More kitchen photos...

More kitchen photos...

The family room...

The kitchen eating area with sliding doors to the back yard...

This is the view while standing in the eating area and looking back towards the living room.

That is about it for the main floor, there is also a half-bath and a back entrance but they are not too exciting.  On the second floor, there is the Master Bedroom with walk-in closet, Master Bath and laundry room, plus a full bath in the hall and two bedrooms.  One of the rooms will be a dedicated guest room and the other one, which has access to a second floor deck overlooking the backyard, we will use as a tv room/den/library.

Master Bedroom

Master Bath

Laundry room off the Master Bedroom

Part of the Master Bath/Laundry Room off the Master Bedroom

My half of the walk-in closet

 

Ian's part of the walk-in closet

Guest Bedroom (note the massive floor to ceiling windows!)

View of the backyard from the guest bedroom

Poor quality photo of the bedroom we will use as a den.  To the right you can see the door leading to the deck.  Again, note the huge windows.  Despite the photo the rooms are really light and bright!

 That's it!  Our closing date for selling our current house and buying the new one is March 16th.  The movers will be arriving sometime between March12th to pack up the Minneapolis house and then will arrive between March 17th and 19th in KC.  For all of you living in denial that we are actually moving, I hate to hit you with this dose of reality, but in about a month, we will be out of 5500 Thomas!

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Ken Update

On Sunday afternoon, Mary Jo drove Ken down to the Mayo Clinic's ER because he's been having increasing pain in the general region of his liver and he's been having considerable difficulties eating/swallowing.  About a month ago, he started a new chemo regime - interferon and something - although the doctors had confessed that they were sailing in uncharted waters with him since he had already survived longer than the norm for his type of cancer.  And not only just survived, but really, he has done amazingly well during these past three years.  When I talked to Ken about it about a month ago, he took a sort of perverse--but well-deserved--pride in being the strongest kidney cancer patient on record at the Mayo.

About a week ago, Ken and MJ decided to stop the chemo because they felt it was accelerating the extreme fatigue and causing the swallowing problems.  When things didn't improve much after stopping the chemo, and the pain has only continued to grow (varying between a 3 and a 9 on a scale of 1-10, depending on what he is doing and how he is positioned), they decided that they would feel better seeing their doctors at the Mayo.  So, after an interesting few hours in the ER with some fascinating people-watching, Ken was seen and they decided to admit him to Mayo-Methodist for tests.

In the end, it appears that the pain in caused by the tumor on his liver.  The team of doctors/med students (Ken refers to them as the Vultures) came through and determined that he breaths deeply or is in certain positions, his diaphram pushes down against his liver and the tumor and this is causing the pain.  At one point they thought perhaps the pain was being caused by gall stones, which I thinking we were all hoping for because then they could take him in for surgery and remove the source of the pain; however, they are pretty sure that is not the case so now they are left with giving him pain medications to mask the pain.

Unfortunately, the pain medications leave him pretty sleepy but when he wakes up he is clear-headed and his usual self.

I was down there all day yesterday and Ken was in and out, but when he was "in" he was his usual, feisty, opinionated, funny self.  Who knows what happens from here? 

I think that if they could get his pain meds titrated so that he isn't so groggy that he can't get out of bed, he will be much happier.  That is what I am hoping for.  It looks like they are sending him home today.

I left my niece in San Francisco...High on a hill...

I really did leave my niece, Meredith, in San Francisco last weekend.  On a hill in Pacific Heights.  Of course, that was the intention all along since the whole point of the weekend was to get her settled into her new apartment.  Meredith graduated from Villanova in Philadelphia back in May and starts a new job with PwC in San Francisco next week and in the interval managed to find herself an amazing apartment in a beautiful neighborhood!


Here is a little video tour of her apartment but I would suggest turning the sound down since I am babbling in the background.

The quality isn't great since I just shot this with my phone, plus I cannot figure out how to rotate the video clip so sorry about that.  Still it gives you an idea of where Mere is living.

We had a really lovely weekend.  Perhaps I shouldn't speak for Meredith, but I had a really lovely weekend with Meredith and if she didn't have quite as wonderful a time, at least she was gracious enough to fake a positive attitude.  They were LONG days though!  Meredith arrived with only two suitcases and two boxes of clothes and small items and we ran around the Bay Area looking for inexpensive furniture (mostly IKEA), sheets, towels, miscellaneous supplies, groceries, etc.

Meredith was very concerned about the cost of everything and we did try to be frugal; but I kept telling her that if her mother was truly concerned about containing costs of the move, then she shouldn't have put me--her sister with no financial good sense and a great love of decorating--in charge.  Seriously, what was Margaret thinking?  Despite me, we managed to set Meredith up for a very reasonable amount. 

Mere will have three roommates - all strangers to each other - and shockingly enough, they all seem really nice and normal.  Another Craigslist.com success story.

Oh, the embarrassment!

Ian is out of town so I've been rambling around the house by myself (well, Attila and Bodicea are there but they don't keep me on the straight and narrow) which usually means that I watch sappy chick flicks, or made-for-TV movies on Lifetime, but last night I sunk to a new low.

While channel surfing after watching a god-awful movie on Lifetime, I stumbled upon an infomercial from Time-Life on "Singers and Songwriters".  I was all set to just surf right past it but they started playing a snippet of James Taylor's Sweet Baby James, followed by Cat Stevens' Wild World, follow by Paul Simon's Still Crazy After All These Years, followed by Don McLean's American Pie....and what was I supposed to do?  How do you turn away from Don McLean and American Pie?  I was singing along because I know all the words to all those songs, and I found I couldn't turn the channel...and pretty soon something like 20 minutes had passed and I was still there, singing along with all 150 songs.  But wait, there's more!  The also had The Classics (free with purchase of Singers and Songwriters) and I knew all of those songs as well.

The sad thing was, there wasn't even any wine involved.  I was that pathetic absolutely sober.

Finally, the trance was broken when Margaret and Dave stopped by to return the kayak and I had to hurriedly turn off the TV lest they see what a sad sack I truly am.

In my defense, at least I didn't order anything...

(...but it did cross my mind)

Singers and Songwriters

Greetings from the Free and Hansiatic City of Hamburg

I like Hamburg.  I went on a tour of the city on Sunday afternoon and was really impressed.  It's very clean (as one would expect from a German city) but it also has an interesting history.   But we won't get into a history lesson. 

I am here for the International Society for Professional Innovation Management which has been a very mixed bag.  I've met several very interesting people, made a new friend in a woman from Latvia whose name is Gundega which is the name of the flower we call "Buttercup" which I think is a fantastic name, although I find myself wanting to greet her each day with, "What's up, Buttercup?", but I am not sure that she would really appreciate that.  I think it's funny when Mr. Barker says it to me, but she might just think I was strange.  

Most of the conference has been really academically focused and we all know that I have problems with people claiming to be experts on business and/or the challenges of managing technology when they have never worked in a business nor had anything to do with developing or managing technology.  Still, there are enough corporate types here to make it worthwhile.

I am staying at the Alster-Hof Hotel which is, of course, almost painfully clean if not just a wee-bit dated.  The location is wonderful, though, being just a couple blocks from the Binnen Alster (you were right, Ken) which is the little, lower part of Lake Alster.  Much like Minneapolis, there is a chain of lake here in Hamburg, surrounded by beautiful homes and trendy neighborhoods.   

Here is a photo of the Binnen Alster with the spires of four of the major churches and the Rathaus (City Hall - I love that they call the seats of local government "Rat" Houses...what could be more appropriate?).

Here's the Rathaus and the canal that runs alongside.

There are canals all over the place.  These are the old warehouses which had been built back in Hamburg's Hansa history.  At the time they were built, it was the largest warehouse complex in the world.

Parts of Hamburg were destroyed in The War, but amazingly much of it remains.

Amusingly, our planned social event for this evening is a Mississippi paddleboat ride/dinner down the Elbe!  Ha!  To think I have flown thousands of miles to take a boat tour which is part of every conference in Minneapolis/St. Paul!

Bis bald!

Bodicea Silliness

Our new cat, Bodicea, having fun with a shopping bag.  She had been going absolutely crazy with it and, of course, I missed that while I was looking for the camera but while this is more subdued, it is still cute.

Slideshow of photos from Spain

The Rain in Spain...

Ah...Valencia...warmth,sunshine..hmm...not so much.

So our warm weather vacation wasn't quite as warm as we might have planned but it was still absolutely delightful! We had the opportunity to stay with a couple of Ian's friends from college at their second home in Spain and it was really a wonderful visit! Poor Suzanne and Paul were stuck with us non-stop for almost a week but they were very gracious about it.

Xabia (I think!)

Suzanne and Paul have a lovely home just outside of Denia and we spent the week visiting local markets, walking the hillside, reading, watching football (soccer) and cricket, but mostly eating and visiting and eating some more. The food was fantastic! We ate like kings! Suzanne (and Paul) created such delicious meals for us that Ian and I are now committed to cooking more and better at home.

Ian, Tess, Suzanne, and Paul in Denia.

We quickly slipped into a relaxed routine of sleeping in, having a little breakfast on the patio, wandering or reading, eating a late lunch, wandering or reading, and having dinner at about 9pm and then watching cricket or soccer and THEN sitting around drinking wine and visiting until WAY past my bedtime.

Now that we are back home we are back to our usual, up at 6am, at work by 8:30-ish, and asleep by 10-ish. Oh well...

Ian in front of the very futurist IMAX theatre and Art Museum in Valencia--The whole complex is amazing (there are more photos in the slideshow to the right).

It actually feels like we'd been gone longer than a week because the weather here in Minnesota had changed so much in our absence. When we left there was still a covering of about 2 feet of snow everywhere with snowbanks along the streets between 4 and 6 feet and when we got back there was a lot of soggy bare ground and the dirty, salty, sandy remains of snowbanks. Yesterday morning they were talking on the radio about how the temperatures were REALLY going to drop and be prepared for frigid weather for the rest of the week. I was sure they were going to say the temps were in the single digits but then they announced low-30s! Two weeks ago, low-30s would have been deemed "balmy".

Oh the difference 13 days makes!

Fallas Festival in Valencia. The dresses are amazing--beautiful fabric and ornate designs--there was a parade led by the youngest girls, and in the plazas they created huge amazing papier mache floats which were to be burned on the last day of the festival.

Happy Christmas!

We had a lovely Christmas!  On Christmas Eve Day, we arrived down in Mankato at about 1:00pm and had a relaxed afternoon hanging out, chatting, snacking, and playing a little Trivial Pursuit (Team Treetie-Meredith won both games!).  People did an excellent job with gift-giving and we both go very nice gifts.  Ian, was perhaps, most happy with his gifts.

Yes...yes...it's more little metal men.  Ken and Mary Jo gave Ian a collection of beautiful Revolutionary War pieces and as soon as we got home, Ian immediately set them up.  Of course, things didn't stop there. Next we set about setting up the diarama of the battle of Waterloo in the coffee table.  This was made easier due to the book give to Ian by Margaret.

Look at how happy he looks!  It's pretty cool.

Chris Kluwe - Punter for the Vikings

Last night Ian and I drove up to Anoka, to the Courtside Bar and Grill so that Ian could be taped to the "MIAC Minute" to be shown on Fox News 9 on Sunday. 

It was a pretty interesting evening, as it turned out.  Also there for the show was Chris Kluwe, the punter for the Minnesota Vikings football team and he was a really nice guy.  I, being a doorknob, insisted that Mr. Barker stand for a couple photos.

I forget that Ian is a big guy.  Chris Kluwe, as a punter, is clearly not the biggest Viking, but he positively dwarfed most of the guys in the bar last night---except Ian, who was pretty comparably sized.

Not only was it nice to meet Chris Kluwe, but it was interesting to see how they film these things.  They film in 2.5 minute segments and the host Ron is very adept at taking just a few bits on information and building them into a conversation that flows.  He gets a lot of information and a little rapport-building chatter packed into those two minutes and still makes it seem unrushed.

BBC Book List

Rumor has it that the BBC put together this list of "classic" books and estimates that most people will only have read 6 of them. 

Ha!  I showed them...I've read 59.  The ones in bold are the ones I have read, the ones in italics I have only read part of or started but never finished.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible -
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazu Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

New Kitchen Remodel Pictures

So a few people have asked me to post new pictures of the new kitchen so here you go.  It's not completely done--the tv will be installed on the wall next week and I still have to tile the marble backsplash:

I also painted the living room and got a new couch so here's how that is looking now.

The glass-topped table is where Ian is going to recreate the Battle of Waterloo with is 300 tiny metal soldiers.

Finally, here are a couple photos of Attila looking pensive...or looking like he wants to crash through the window to attack (and eat) some poor defenseless squirrel:

Happy News! I don't have to take the GRE!

I was just talking to the Director of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (HSTM) program and he assured me that they will not require that I take the GRE and it will not reflect negatively upon my application!  This is very good news indeed since I my preparation for the Math section wasn't going so well...although I do think I would have done very well on the Verbal and Written.

The Best Buy/Geek Squad guy came by the house today to advise us on how best to install the new tv on the new flatscreen tv on the new kitchen wall.  The good news is that it will look great and do everything that we want, the bad thing is that I have to have the electrician back to the house to add an outlet.  Oh well---just part of the never ending kitchen project.

Thanksgiving Airport Travel Without the Hassle

We just took Tara and the kids to the airport this morning to send them on their way to Florida and we had worked out a plan to maneuver them through the airport with the least amount of hassle.  All for naught.  We practically had the airport to ourselves--Ian dropped us off at the curb and then went to park the car, and Tara, the kids and I walked directly up to the ticketing counter and were helped immediately.  From there we went to security and since there was no line at all, I didn't even have a chance to point out to the kids what the procedure would be.  By the time Ian had parked the car, Tara and the kids were collecting up their shoes and jackets on the other side of security.  Amazing.

Completely unrelated...here's a couple pictures of Attila.